1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic-mail processing apparatus and an electronic-mail processing system, both of which are used for publishing electronic mail which satisfies specific conditions.
2. Related Background Art
Along with the trend of the paperless office, instead of using paper, electronic mail is increasingly being employed in companies to send communication notices from senior executives to middle managers. Previously, the middle managers generally received such notices and transferred them to their subordinates by electronic mail.
In this method, however, each subordinate has a copy of the same notice in his/her terminal, thereby wasting the storage capacity of the terminal. Moreover, since data concerning such notices is managed by the individuals, accidental operations, such as deleting the data, are likely to occur.
By virtue of the recent advent of publishing servers, if the managers register data sent from the senior executives in a publishing server, their subordinates are able to read data, thereby preventing the data from being doubly managed by the managers and their subordinates.
Even in this method, however, it is required that the managers first identify electronic mail as communication notices and then edit it into the form of publishable pages before registering it in the publishing server. This is time-consuming and troublesome.
To further solve the above problem, electronic-mail transmitting/receiving applications may be used. Some transmitting/receiving applications have a filtering capability in which, certain conditions, which are referred to as "the filtering conditions", are set to determine whether received electronic mail satisfies the set conditions, and upon determination, mail items are distributed and stored in specific mail boxes. By the use of the above capability, the managers start the electronic-mail transmitting/receiving application to create a mail box specifically used for communication notices, thereby making it possible to automatically collect only notice mail in the mail box. Then, the managers upload the contents of the mail box to the publishing server.
In the above known method, however, in order to reflect newly sent notices in the publishing server, the contents of the notice mail box should be updated by starting the electronic-mail transmitting/receiving application to obtain mail items from a mail server and distributing them into the respective mail boxes. It is also necessary to upload to the publishing server that the contents of the notice mail box have been updated and to update the contents of a mailbox published page on the publishing server. Thus, in the foregoing known methods, the operation procedure for publishing the notices is too complicated.